Giant Animal Sculptures Question the Practice of Hunting for Game Trophies

Giant Animal Sculptures by Quentin Garel

The tradition of keeping animal trophies has been around for centuries. French artist Quentin Garel explores the practice of hunting game for sport in his series of large-scale sculptures. Cast from bronze or carved from wood, these massive works of art are installed in rooms and outdoor spaces, resembling slain animals that have been taxidermied for display.

From elephants and giraffes to enormous tentacles, Garel covers a breadth of biological diversity. Some are even rendered as stylized skulls and skeletons which ominously decorate rooms. “Garel is an archaeologist of the present, who reinterprets the animal figure through a multitude of morphological variations,” his artist statement reads. “It all started 20 years ago when his work took an ironic look at hunting trophies: he denounced a proud practice of man, domination over the animal seen only as an object of consumption.”

In most of these giant figures, viewers end up looking eye-to-eye with the sculpture. As a result, they are meant to question why people like to “show off” their hunting success in this way. “If Garel plays with reality and the relationship of scale to divert the forms and invent a population from a parallel paleontological world,” the statement adds, “at first glance his sculptures are an illusion, they become the remains of a real animal, in a subtle assembly of wood and bronze that he works in such a way that we can not differentiate them with the naked eye.”

Scroll down to see more sculptures, and follow Garel on Instagram to keep up to date with his latest projects.